


Circles on Slant

by hellkitty



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: M/M, Off-screen Canon Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-23
Updated: 2013-06-23
Packaged: 2017-12-15 21:45:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/854376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellkitty/pseuds/hellkitty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A little tf-rare-pairing thing: Drift/Wing full circle.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Circles on Slant

“I want to show you something,” Wing said, gesturing Drift over.  Drift gave a tired sigh, moving stiffly, sore from the day’s sparring.  But whatever it was had to be better than stewing in frustration.  Maybe. Not like Drift had anything better to do.

“What.” As unenthusiastically as possible.

Wing’s face quirked into a smile, as though Drift’s surliness were endearing.  Who knew, in this fraggin’ backward city?  He held out a lightpad, the weird kind they used in Crystal City, like two sheets of glass, clear framed, that lit cobalt blue.  “Watch,” he said, and traced a finger on the lightpad into a glowing circle. He looked up.

“Circle,” Drift said, bored. What was this? Testing to see if he knew shapes? He didn’t have any fancy schooling, but frag, he knew basic geometry. 

“Is it?”

Drift scowled. “Of course it is. It’s round. Circle.” 

Wing’s smile softened. “It’s only a circle from this perspective.”

Drift rolled his optics. “Fraggin’ circle no matter how you look at it. Maybe an oval,” he said, sarcastically, “if you want to get all technical.”

“I’m not technical,” Wing said, easily. “But, look.” He made a gesture over the lightpad and the shape seemed to lift into a projection, uncoiling itself into one loop of a spiral. “You see? When you see it in time, it becomes a spiral.”

“So?”  Big deal.

“So, you come back to the same point, but you’re different, above it. And then,” He started drawing again, a three-dimensional spiral  on top of the other, “again and again, always upward, always progress. But sometimes, it doesn’t feel like that. Sometimes it feels,” Another gesture and the spiral flattened back down onto the lightpad into a glowing circle, “like you’ve gone nowhere at all.”

[***]

Drift slumped against the wall in his hab suite, part of him wishing there was still something he should be doing, someone else to take to medibay, someone else to account for. He’d even written all of his reports, submitting them to Rodimus, despite the fact that Rodimus had been on Theophany himself, and didn’t really need the information. 

Now, he was alone, and done, with nothing to fill his cortex, nothing to stop him from thinking.

He didn’t want to think, he didn’t like thinking. It always brought back so many memories, all of them bad, and no matter how hard he tried, how often he sat in meditation, trying to let the memories blunt themselves against him,  it felt sometimes he would never be done with them.

Like now.  Only now it was worse because the beautiful memories of Crystal City had shattered themselves against the broken, jagged ruin of what the city had become.  He’d never enjoyed the city for what it was; he’d only had glimpses of the city through his own pitiful discontent, sidelong flashes of beauty he’d longed, for ages, to look at straight on.

His hand slipped to his storage compartment, drawing out the little thing he’d snatched and stowed there, like a talisman, before he’d run to battle.  It was a lightpad, one screen spiderwebbed with cracks. It wasn’t Wing’s—he doubted providence could be that precise. But it called that moment to mind, the blue lit spiral growing and flattening, limning the too-beautiful lines of Wing’s face: lips he never got to kiss, optics he never got to see himself happy in. 

A spiral, Wing said, coming back to the same place, but different, changed by time and circumstance. In Wing’s drawing, Drift thought, the spiral had gone upward. But it could go downward as well: not all motion was forward. 

His mouth twitched into a bitter smile, one finger tracing a circle over the lightpad’s surface, feeling the glass cool under his battered finger. It lit up, in the same blue he remembered, one arc of the circle fuzzed and hazed and imprecise from the damage, but it seemed to stretch across time, connecting his past to the present. As Wing said, sometimes it felt like you went nowhere at all. 

Where had he gone? To the war, to the Autobots, to Cybertron and Earth and back, spirals within spirals, like little fractals around the path. 

He closed his optics, slowly, as though trying to lock in the bright cobalt blue into his memory, a light pure and clean, like Wing.

And he still wasn’t good enough, for all he’d tried.  He’d give anything to see Wing again, to see that innocent, beautiful smile, to hear the rich tenor of Wing’s voice, saying his name.  He knew Wing was dead, even going down there he’d known whatever they’d find, it wouldn’t be Wing.

Well, maybe he’d hoped, in a childish, illogical hope, the way you ache for miracles, the way you want a chance to touch what you had been too shy, too damaged, to see before.  

But Theophany’s ruin had been definitive, a crushing of even a sliver of hope, of memory. And he wondered how much was his fault, how much was the devastation he’d brought in his wake.  Lockdown knew where Crystal City was, after all. And Lockdown would sell the secret to anyone with a large enough sum of shanix.  They’d paid the price for trusting him, for taking him in.  And the worst, the absolute worst part of it all was that he knew, in his spark, that Wing would forgive him, would find nothing in it that needed forgiveness, would simply accept it the way he’d accepted joining Drift on the surface, knowing it was certain death. Wing did everything that way: wholehearted  and open, not just accepting, but welcoming everything, ever twist of fate, every event, as something that led him up along his own spiral.

Drift deactivated the lightpad, the blue glow seemed to stay, slow to fade from his optics, like an omen.

He looked up at the starless sky: the titan had already torn them far away from the planet.  But he knew he'd be back, he knew one day he'd return, his pattern leading him there like a spiral of light, and maybe by then he'd have shed this darkness.


End file.
